Category: Ubuntu

There was a story posted on Slashdot today with regard to Bug #59695 (No link, intentionally). Apart from the fact that it was extremely poor form to post a link to Launchpad thus slashdotting a major bug tracking tool, this issue should be addressed quickly. Here is the bug report:

When switching to battery power, /etc/acpi/power.sh issues the command hdparm -B 1 to all block devices. This leads to extremely frequent load cycles. For example, my new thinkpad has already done well over 7000 load cycles — in only 100 hours. That’s at least one unloading per minute. Googling for “load unload cycles notebook OR laptop” shows that most laptop drives handle up to 600,000 such cycles. As these values clearly show, this issue is of high importance and should be fixed sooner rather than later.

Please see for yourself how often your drive is load cycling:
smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda
(This command is for an SATA drive; you’ll need to install the smartmontools package first.)

See also http://paul.luon.net/journal/hacking/BrokenHDDs.html for a rather dramatic account of the effects the current default values may have.

Just in case the load/unload timeout depends on the specific laptop or disk model, here are my system specifications:
ThinkPad Z60m & Hitachi HTS541080G9SA00 disk (80GB)